The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey Read Online Free PDF Page B

stained-glass windows of Jesus, John the Baptist, Job, Jonah, and Mary Magdalene. Magdalene was a beautiful name.
    One day when he was no more than seven he was standing out in front of that church with a note in his hand. He couldn’t remember on the number 87b bus who that note was for or from but he could feel the dirt under his bare feet and the hot sun on his forehead.
    “What you want there, boy?” a man asked in a commanding voice.
    Ptolemy was gazing down on the dark Spanish man’s brown leather shoes in the bus but when he looked up he saw that white man standing in front of the white people’s church.
    “Lookin’,” he said in a small piping voice.
    “Is that note for me?” the man asked.
    Li’l Pea thought the word no , but all he did was shake his head.
    The white man wore a white suit with a black shirt that sported a small square of stiff white cloth where his Adam’s apple would have shown. He wore a wide-brimmed Panama straw hat and glasses with gold wire frames.
    “Speak up, boy,” he said.
    “No, suh. This note is from my uncle Coy to his brother Lupo work for the Littletons down on Poinsettia Street,” Ptolemy said, remembering as he did the origins of the note.
    “Then why you standin’ in front’a my church?”
    The sun was above and behind the church spire so whenever the man in the preacher’s uniform moved his head, bright sabers of light lanced into Ptolemy’s eyes.
    “It’s so pretty,” the man, Ptolemy, remembered saying.
    The minister paused a moment, his stern visage softened a bit.
    “You like this church?” he asked.
    “Yes, suh.”
    “Did you evah look inside?”
    “No, suh. I jes’ seen the whitewashed walls an’ the windahs and the pretty grass lawn.”
    The minister squinted as people did sometimes when they were trying to make out words that didn’t make sense to them. Li’l Pea often wondered how narrowing your eyes could make your hearing better.
    “You know that you can never, or none of your people can ever, go into this church,” the man said.
    “Yes, suh, I know.”
    “Is that why you lookin’ at it so hard?”
    “No. It’s jes’ when I walk by it, it look so pretty like Letta across the way from Uncle Coy’s windah. You have to look when somethin’s pretty.”
    The white man turned his back on the boy and looked at his church. He maintained that position for a few moments, allowing Li’l Pea to admire the building a while longer.
    When the white man turned around, his face was completely changed, as if he were a different man inside. He held out a hand to the boy. The child didn’t know what to do, but he was drawn to the gesture. He grabbed the minister’s manicured fingers with his dirty hand and gave them a good shaking.
    “Thank you, boy,” the minister said. “You’ve shown me my own life in a new light. It’s like, it’s like I thought it was day but really there was much more to be seen.”
    The white man walked away after that.
    Ptolemy had often wondered, in the eighty-four years that had passed since that day, what the minister had meant.
    “Come on, Papa Grey,” Hilly said in a bus a million miles away, “this our stop.”

    They walked down a long street of sad houses and apartment buildings. There were few lawns or gardens, mostly weeds and broken concrete. Some of the houses had no paint left on their weathered wood walls; one or two seemed crooked because they were falling in on themselves from the ravages of termites, faltering foundations, and general rot.
    Ptolemy thought all these things but he couldn’t remember how to say them.
    “Terrible.”
    “What, Papa Grey?”
    “Terrible.”
    “What? You hurt?”
    “My knees hurt when I walk.”
    “That’s too bad.”
    “But it’s not terrible,” Ptolemy said.
    “Then what?”
    The old man glanced across the street and saw a big sand-brown woman sitting on a stoop. She was smoking a cigarette and between her fat knees were huddled two toddlers in diapers and